Paris Demetriades
Not long ago, I had the chance to sit in the audience during the recording of a podcast, or more precisely a vodcast, hosted by Antonis Polydorou, with Giorgos Pamboridis as a guest. He is a popular political figure whose appeal clearly goes beyond the narrow limits of his own party. Having earned a reputation as a “doer” politician, and having succeeded as Minister of Health in implementing the General Healthcare System, Pamboridis enjoys the respect of many citizens. Some of them do not support the Democratic Rally and may even stand firmly against it.
During that interview, and in the streetwise and sometimes confrontational style that defines him, Giorgos Pamboridis spoke, among other things, about what he called the great achievement of the right-wing camp, and specifically of the Anastasiades administration. According to him, they pulled the country out of bankruptcy a decade ago through the controversial citizenship-by-investment program, which he himself acknowledged as problematic. This claim is not an invention of the likable and resourceful Pamboridis. It is a familiar “yes, but” narrative that figures within DISY have embraced since the moment the scandal-ridden scheme collapsed, following the infamous Al Jazeera documentary that led to those now well-known tragic and absurd events. More generally, the narrative that “we, the rallyists, know how to manage the economy” has come to dominate public life in our no-longer-young republic. It is a narrative that resonates, not only with committed party loyalists.
A decade later, with enough distance from those events, it makes sense to ask a simple question in a calm and clear-eyed way, the kind of realism that Mr. Pamboridis and others like him often invoke. How well has this narrative held up over time, and who has it actually benefited, both in the years right after 2013 and in the period up to today?
These thoughts did not appear out of nowhere, nor are they written with the carelessness of a biased, aimless revolutionary. I am writing less than fifteen days after a building in the city where I was born and raised collapsed suddenly like a house of cards, killing two unsuspecting people. One of them was identified only eleven days after the tragedy. I am writing one year after other fellow citizens, including an entire family, died, again in Limassol, from poverty and cold. Most of all, I am writing at a time when, as a direct result of the so-called prudent policy that supposedly led us out of bankruptcy, unprecedented opportunities have been created for a powerful minority to grow rich, not always through lawful means. At the same time, a much larger part of the population has been pushed into poverty and hardship.
The issue is not limited to the citizenship program. There is also the influx of foreign companies and investment. While this has created very high-paying jobs, it has also driven rents, especially in Limassol, to extreme levels. This creates serious pressure for anyone who does not own adequate property or who works outside the fintech sector, where salaries can keep up with rent prices that resemble those in Manhattan.
In the end, thirteen years after the collapse of the banks and the economy, more people have been harmed by the solution that was supposed to pull us out of bankruptcy than have benefited from it. With the possible exception of the public sector, which appears largely untouched by these developments, a society marked by double standards and stark inequality has become the norm in Cyprus. The image of the shocking wreckage in Germasogeia captures this reality. It is not just a neglected building that collapsed like a house of cards. There are many more like it.
